His Fever is Broken: by James Emerson
Ronnie Stants rocked the table as his beer’s foam head burst onto his clenched fist. He slammed his Budweiser harder than he meant. A mushroom cloud of bubbles spread around his mug and to the middle of the table leaking through the cracks. It dripped to the gravel floor. Pieces of glass shrapnel were still landing ten feet away in good old boys’ spirits.
“God Damned reckless bastard,” they said. A few of them stood raising their fists and wiping sweat and tobacco juice from around their mouths. They gave their wallets to their honeys and told them to buy another fucking round.
“But, baby, you promised this would be your last,” the ladies said, moaning and groaning. They lived in Alabama. They married alcoholics.
A sweet looking barmaid grabbed a brown and yellow stained rag and rushed to the rescue. Swaying her giant hips back and forth to the rhythm of drunk perverts’ eyes scanning her body up and down, she wrung used water from the towel with her hands, grunting and pursing her lips together into a prune shaped mess. Hoots and hollers. Catcalls. She blushed as she bent down to the floor and heard quarters pinging as they zipped into the middle of an empty Folgers’ tip cup. She said, “Next round’s on the house!”
The threat of the brawl was dead. She’d saved the day. He wanted to thank her. Ronnie dropped the handle from the glass he’d just destroyed and stuffed a moist five-dollar bill into the girl’s blouse when she stood. She was taken aback as Ronnie let his eyes linger in the middle of her breasts, which were on full display. A woman’s property is private as long as she wants it to be, she had no interest in keeping her tits secret. Slipping into view once every ten minutes as a routine, she needed to make those quarters somehow. Her busty pair was a pet to the usual drunks stumbling into her dive. They gave her tips nevertheless. They were feeding a bitch as if it was their dog, though they valued their German Shepherds more than her. She had a child, but their dogs had valuable litters. She smiled at Ronnie and jigged a little with her arms around her neck. Ronnie let out a primal scream and went for her with his mouth wide open, green teeth jagged from years of bar tiffs. The sweetheart backed up a little as the stench from Ronnie’s mouth invaded her olfactory and Ronnie said as he grabbed her neck, “You tricking whore! I just tipped five bucks. Two hours wages.”
The table next to Ronnie jumped into action and grabbed his shoulders throwing him to the vomit stained floor. The four brutes knelt around and swung their arms. Balled fists tomahawked his face and chest and groin stroking an onslaught of cheers amongst the enthusiastic onlookers. Drunk or sober, the patrons wanted Ronnie to pay for zapping the color from the beautiful barmaid’s cheeks. Usually so rosy, her cheeks were porridge gray, but without the sugar. Sloppy and sagging tear stained cheeks trying to keep courage, but she coughed still struggling for air. An older gentleman, a beautiful nameless soul, walked up to her with an old rusted skinning knife and said, “Honey, I ain’t ever talked to you, but I’m gonna make this right.”
He extended his left arm and took the knife’s dull edge to his palm. He slid it back and forth until he saw blood. It wasn’t a deep cut. He put the antique knife under his armpit and dabbed the wound with his ring finger. He pulled her close as emotions were high within the crowd and smeared the crimson juice across her cheeks until they were proud and confident. One, two, three…seventeen quarters rang across the bar room floor and into her Folgers’ cup. She went back to work soaking up the wasted beer, but still wheezing.
Ronnie was black and blue on the floor, but the barmaid’s saviors’ arms were losing speed. Before long, they tired of him and went back to their Dominoes match. After all, a ten-dollar bill was on the line and a dead person isn’t fun to bludgeon. They called on a bartender to clean up the mess. The bartender signaled the spicy red-cheeked barmaid cleaning the table to take care of him. She had experience for this type of situation and escaped out the back entrance returning five minutes later with a run-down wheelbarrow covered in blood and hair and teeth.
She pushed it to Ronnie’s side and parked. The barmaid looked around begging for a partner to help, but there were no volunteers. The old man who’d cut his hand leaned his head on the bar table and passed out. The bartender tapped him on his head. There was no sign except a groan. The bartender lost his patience and pushed the old man to his back. He smashed his head and a puddle of blood pooled under his long gray hair. The bartender mouthed to the barmaid, “He’s next.”
She rolled her eyes as she struggled to put Ronnie in the wheelbarrow. Her blouse was doused in Ronnie’s red glaze, but she did the job and Ronnie lay crumpled in the well-worked wheelbarrow ready for disposal. She pushed him to the exit and propped open the door with a chunk of soggy firewood unused from the previous winter. Behind the old fashioned tavern there was a river and this is where she’d dumped things before, though not necessarily humans. She rolled to the edge of a steep ravine and tilted the wheelbarrow forward.
It’d rained all day and the ground was muddy and slippery. In her heels, the beautiful barmaid was in a bad situation. She leaned the wheelbarrow higher, but Ronnie wasn’t moving. His jaw was stuck on the edge. She shook the wheelbarrow. She jumped up and down and lost her senses until her heel broke and she fell over the edge.
Ronnie was falling with her as she held onto his tie and the last thing the beloved barmaid saw before it all went dark was Ronnie coming at her with his mouth wide open. She died. Ronnie didn’t. He was never dead and she’d sensed a faint heartbeat while she’d moved him into the wheelbarrow declining to save his life.
The next morning a boat filled by white clothed, clean-cut believers rowing their way through morning exercises happened across an unfortunate couple lying on the rocky shores of their Alabaman river. They paddled to them and found to their surprise one was alive! The rowers grabbed him and tossed the dead lady to the side rushing to their encampment. They hoped they could save his life. Months, weeks, days, whatever the toll, it was a duty manifested by the one they loved. Always working to out measure their bad deeds, this would be the thing to get them through Heaven’s pearly gates. A fever, a coma, if only they could save his life, but two weeks later and hope ran thin. This ensemble of good-hearted communalists reserved a hollow grave and huddled around him. They meant to put a bullet through his temple as he rested in the bottom of their crude grave only three feet deep.
One man cocked the Colt revolver and some of the spectators closed their eyes holding back sobs, squeezing their hands tight. Though his heart still thumped, they felt it more merciful to put his misery to an end. They thought it more fit sending him to the devil and his demons or to the good Lord with His virgins sitting atop His lap. As the gunman pointed the barrel downward ready to turn the metal glowing orange, he noticed a few beads of sweat glimmering off the man’s forehead. More started appearing on his stomach and his legs and his arms. It meant only one thing. The fever was broken. One by one, the men started saying, “His fever has broken! His fever has broken? His fever has broken!”
The stranger’s eyes opened and the group’s cheers sang in unison with a nest of whistling Mockingbirds perched on the branches of a giant Oak. It was a miracle claimed by Reverend Beat, the last to touch Ronnie Stants’ naked body before his fever had broken in August, Alabama.
BLOW-UP
